These are some variations on a graphic I recently came up with.
I’ve always been fascinated with black and white art. Most of the imagery associated with punk rock that I grew up with was bold and simple, and came from a sort of do-it-yourself/grass roots mentality (i.e., it costs more to print in color and with black and white art you can draw it yourself and run a thousand copies on a Xerox for next to nothing). I spent many hours as a youth doodling in sharpie marker on paper, fabric, and various other materials which was great exercise for a graphic artist because any strong graphic should be able to hold up in black-and-white just as well as in color.
I’ve also been fascinated by screen printing for some time and hope to eventually experiment some more with the medium and print my own t-shirts. Being a person who doesn’t care much to be defined by name brand clothing, the last thing I’d want to do is come up with some clever name and print it on t-shirts for myself or anyone else to wear. The more I thought about what I might eventually do, the more the concept of unity kept coming to my mind. Unity is a concept that everyone can (hopefully) agree with, regardless of religion, politics or other divisive standings. Even though it would in some ways be a branding, it would at least be something meaningful. I can recall a few times being in a store and coming across a shirt that had a nice graphic on it but I didn’t recognize the name brand. In these cases I would be hesitant to wear it even if I did dig the design, mostly because I don’t know what else that name stands for. If I saw a shirt that said, “Unity” then how can I really go wrong with wearing it? I hope by now you can see where I’m going with this. I don’t know if this idea will ever materialize, and even if it does it may just be me making shirts for myself… which I’m absolutely fine with, but at least it’s given me some inspiration to create for now.